Monday, December 24, 2007

Now that the niceties are out of the way, let's get to business. The Sens played pretty well against the Rangers on Sunday evening, winning 3-1 to go into Christmas break. Which is always nice.

Martin Gerber had a solid game, and kept the Sens in it through the first period, while Ottawa was tremendously ousthot and outplayed by New York.

One good thing about having a farm team in New York is that in the rare occasion that a player gets injured the day before the Sens have a road game against the Rangers, a callup can get to the game relatively quickly. And that's exactly what happened after Joe Corvo suffered an injury against the Thrashers and Larry Nycholat was brought in to replace him. Nycholat had a solid game, and the team played pretty well defensively considering two of the top-six d-men were out of the lineup. In particular, Andrej Meszaros had a good game, and played a hard game physically.

Shean Donovan finally got rewarded for the hard work he's been doing, and it paid off. He looked pretty good alongside Chris Kelly (who scored a goal) and Antoine Vermette, and it looks like those two are starting to come out of their funk. Which is a plus. Unfortunately, Dean McAmmond was benched for most of the game, and only got two minutes or so in the game. I can almost understand benching young, unexperienced rookies like Cody Bass and Nick Foligno (almost, but not quite), but D-Mac is one of the most defensively responsible players on the team. He's made two mistakes in the last two games, and both have been costly, but he's also scored two points. When you refuse to give a player like McAmmond the opportunity to make up for the mistakes he makes, you're missing out.

The break the Sens are on right now will be a short one, and they'll be playing again on Wednesday. I'm not sure if Ben or I'll be posting in the meantime, but I have a feeling I'll have something to say.